


Run For The Fences

by linzeestyle



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Faked Death, Gen, M/M, POV Natasha Romanov, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 18:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18878731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linzeestyle/pseuds/linzeestyle
Summary: Natasha knew it was coming, but she still isn’t ready, when Maria Hill calls her, close to two am three weeks after the hearings. Captain America’s disappeared in Slovenia, four days into a lead on a Hydra facility, and Hill’s voice is low and serious and frayed at the edges when she asksNatasha, I want the truth, Romanov. Should I even send in search and rescue?





	Run For The Fences

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repost from 2015. I have missed y'all.

_Washington,  D.C., USA_

When they talk about it later, this is how it ends. 

Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes was pardoned posthumously, upon intense pressure, both public and international, ten months after the SHIELD intel leaks, after the Winter Soldier’s presumed death in the explosion of the Insight carriers. If two months of searching never produced a body, then the damage to the carriers made that a small surprise: there wasn’t much left of the third carrier itself, smoldering in ashes on the edges of the river.

Steve Rogers stood present for every hearing he could go to, sat, hands clasped outside, for the ones that he couldn’t. Every inch the grieving widower in a black suit and muted tie, shoulders slumped and the fight all gone out of him. Someone with a camera phone took a picture of him on the last day of deliberations, and now the photo is circulating everywhere online, Steve with his head in his hands, a magazine open on his thigh with the now-famous grainy image of the Winter Soldier on its cover.

Natasha knew it was coming, but she still isn’t ready, when Maria Hill calls her, close to two am three weeks after the hearings. Captain America’s disappeared in Slovenia, four days into a lead on a Hydra facility, and Hill’s voice is low and serious and frayed at the edges when she asks Natasha, _I want the truth, Romanov. Should I even send in search and rescue?_

There’s a map on Natasha’s wall, a few decades old now, enough to be useless; she traces the edges of the USSR and thinks back to the day of the judge’s decision, finding Steve with his hands clasped and his eyes fixed on the floor. Stoic, and Natasha remembers watching Rumlow push him down into shackles that seemed absurd, now, how Steve’s arms and hands showed no injury to match the fractures and bruises on his face after the helicarrier, no sign he had tried to protect himself, had wanted to. Stoic, is not how she would describe Steve Rogers’s grief.

She had sat down beside him, then, squeezed his knee and told him, “you’re a terrible liar.” 

Natasha, though. Natasha isn’t. She cradles her phone and looks out the window, at the inky black of a still-dark sky. 

“Rogers is gone,” she tells Hill. “You send a team, you’re wasting men.” Hill exhales on the other end of the line, and Natasha looks up at the ink-smogged stars and wonders what Steve can see from where he is now. She wonders if he’s found the American yet; if he’ll let himself be found, and what will be waiting, if he does.

Natasha unfolds herself from where she sits at her kitchen table and pours the rest of her cereal into the sink, soggy and barely eaten. Wasteful, she thinks. Ivan would have-- And she drops the bowl with a hard glass crack because she can’t remember the last time she thought of him, can’t remember, sometimes, whether he even existed at all. A fragment, a ghost. She looks down and scowls at the new chip in her ceramics.

Finally, she turns back to her phone, now tinny on speaker. “How many times is that poor bastard going to die for his country before you let it stick, Hill?” She rinses the bowl, scraping at the chipped edge. “Let him have this.”

It’s a heavy, plodding silence before Hill finally speaks, and even her professionalism is wearing into worry when she says, voice low, “no reports. No paper trail. They won’t let it go if they think there’s a chance. But I want to know that this isn’t some kind of flagellation, that he’s not--after what he deserves, chasing down his friend’s corpse.”

Natasha thinks of Steve, lying too far for the water to have carried him from shore, of the shield that appeared in his hospital bedroom two nights later, against his bed. It had terrified Hill and left Natasha searching the thin rails outside, feeling the scrape of five-fingered dents and watching Steve, stare at his own weapon, hands shaking against the mattress.

“Twice a year, Romanov, that’s all I’m asking. No reports. Just...for my own sanity.” Natasha hums, and neither confirms, nor denies.

*

_Geneva, Switzerland_

There's a cafe at the end of a long line of muted row houses that remind Natasha of the time she spent in Volgograd. She drinks from a mug of black coffee and watches the men and women who pass from behind shaded aviator glasses, imagining she can pick out familiar faces in the crowd, imagining she could see a flash of silver in all the flesh and fabric -- as though there would be any chance of catching him; as though something so ephemeral as safety would leave him off of his guard.

She never sees him; she hasn't, since that lasts time in DC. Instead, she sees a flash of blonde hair and a height that will never quite blend into a crowd, even hunched in on himself, dark-rimmed glasses obscuring his face. He isn't alone at first, not this time, and the man with him has dark brown hair and he's wearing gloves despite the mild weather, leaves Steve's side with a kiss to his cheek, disappearing into a crowd of bodies and chatter.

He hasn't left, she doesn't doubt. Steve Rogers sits down in front of her and Natasha wonders how often the Winter Soldier has done this, how often James Barnes has been yards, been feet away, watching Steve under a cover of anonymity in a heartbeat of hundreds. 

"Has anyone ever told you, you look like Captain America?" She doesn't look up from her paper.

"Here?" Steve looks around, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "No, actually. Anybody ever figure out what happened to him?"

Natasha shrugs. "Went MIA a couple years back. Hear the trail’s pretty cold. Department of Defense is considering declaring him killed in action." She looks around. "Where's--"

"Close." Rogers looks around, then back at Natasha. “We’ve been in Oslo for the last few months. I think Bucky’s starting to think about staying. He’s been looking at houses.”

Natasha shrugs. “We’ve set up bank accounts. You could pay cash anywhere.” 

“I think we’d rather have the paperwork. Some kind of identity, anyway. It’s safer that way.” And of course by safer, what Steve means is _permanent_. But Natasha doesn’t say that, and eventually Steve looks up her, nervous, twisting at his own knuckles. “He’s doing better, Tasha.”

“Mmmm.” Natasha chooses her moment, then, to look down at Steve’s fidgeting hands, the gleam of new silver just above his left knuckle. “Apparently.”

“Oh.” Steve twists his palm to cover the ring. “Yeah. A few months now. It was Bucky’s idea, we just sort of-- “ He shrugs, mouth blurring into a smile at the edges. “Makes things easier.”

“Marriage of convenience, Rogers?”

Steve laughs, at that: genuinely, before reaching over and taking Natasha’s coffee from her, taking a long enough drink to empty half the mug before giving it back. She arches an eyebrow, but allows the indiscretion. 

“Not a hell of a lot convenient about this, is there?” He doesn’t look especially put out though -- hard to, Natasha imagines, when he’s only here until James calls, will disappear back into the crowd to find a figure Natasha only sees in glimpses and brief nods, will go back to the life he should have lived in the first place. Steve Rogers will finally be treated like a hero, a real one, one who gets to go _home_ , and Captain America will stay where he belongs, in an empty coffin under a memorial in Arlington; a statue overlooking a view of the Potomac. Steve hasn’t seen either monument. Natasha has never thought to ask if he knows that they exist. Another echo out of time; the man in front of her has nothing to do with the hero his country buried. 

As if sensing her distraction, Steve looks around. “There really aren’t any agents here?” Nearly a year now, and he still asks, every time; like he can’t quite believe SHIELD’s going to let him go like this, like he’s still waiting for the day there are guns and batons and an unmarked van, when he’s loaded up and extradited and told not to make a scene. Sometimes, Natasha wonders if this is

the real reason she never sees James, if he’s waiting just out of eyeshot, covering Steve’s blind side.

 “I told you,” she says quietly, reaching out to touch his hand. “Officially, no one knows you’re alive. No paperwork, no documents. Not even top level. Hell, most of SHIELD still thinks there wasn’t enough left of you for Project TAHITI.” And it shows how close what’s left of SHIELD plays their cards, now, that even the new recruits misunderstand their own tech. Because Project TAHITI was designed specifically for situations like an imagined Captain America, to preserve DNA from minimal remaining biological material. Reanimation and recovery had been a side effect, until it turned useful. Most of SHIELD’s projects seem to turn out that way.

But it’s still better than the other rumor picking up traction. Because Natasha read about Captain America and the Howling Commandos. But she also went through the files of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, and she’s seen the debriefings, read the transcript of Rogers’ last transmission.

Knows how many chutes were left on that zeppelin, and how Steve must have known about it. It’s whispered and hushed in personal time, makes its way to the dedication of his memorial overlooking the Potomac, to require a media gag on the question.

 There’s a big portion of the population that believes Captain America couldn’t live with the death of the Winter Soldier: that this time, Steve Rogers deliberately followed Bucky Barnes down.

Steve still snorts, when reminded of this. “Bucky says I’m too melodramatic to hold out that long.” She doesn’t disagree. Still. “Then why sit through it? Nobody knows who you are out here.”

Steve shrugs, and takes a piece of her pastry. “Felt important. Besides,” he says, picking off a fruit tray, and Natasha gestures to get a waiter’s attention, because they might as well order in triplicate. “Hell of a lot harder to extradite someone who hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Natasha orders a basket of pastries and reminds herself, a twinge of loss of her own down her spine, that Steve Rogers is a tactician before he is anything else -- even, it seems, in love.

 She sees the echo of herself in him, and smiles a little sadly. Somewhere, she’s sure the American--James, again, she thinks, with a twist of something too old to be loss--is watching them, can see her expression, too.

 The rolls and coffee arrive, and she hopes if he’s got his crosshairs on her, he’s somewhere comfortable, son of a bitch. She doesn’t plan on moving for a while, yet.

*

_Oslo, Norway_

There’s one last objective to this mission.

Natasha stays in Geneva a few days longer than Steven and James Rogers (and oh, but Steve always will be a terrible liar). She walks through the markets and remembers missions she took to rich villas she can still sketch out the blueprints for, and she visits the memorial built to Bucky Barnes, dedicated in ‘52 and overlooking a particularly beautiful view of the mountains, sunset hitting and reflecting reds and yellow hues. The edges of her memory are tinted with yellow sun and she thinks she can remember the speech at the ceremony, standing beside her mother and father and-- No, no, that’s wrong, an echo, and it disappears like so much smoke. It’s replaced by an image of the same statue by nightfall, of pressing her back against it, breath cold in her throat while she waits for her partner. The American’s missed the rendezvous point and her instructions are to leave without him but both she and her handlers know that she won’t. She turns, grips a bronze arm to look over into rain-soaked buildings and the moon hits the statue’s profile, so familiar she trips backward, and the American catches her, the hand not holding his gun careful on her shoulder and nothing in his expression when he looks up at the slip-wet statue--

Natasha adjusts dark sunglasses higher on her nose and looks at recolored photographs of Bucky Barnes before the war, tries to reconcile them with the man who tried so hard to keep her safe, hanging on to his humanity by a desperate, gossamer thread. Tries to see anything of the fire- hardened and diamond-shard man Captain America followed into hell, that Steve Rogers loves so completely, who has Steve sewn into himself like skin.

She's on a plane seven hours later.

Wherever they may end up a year from now, for now, Steven and James Rogers rent a Victorian- style walk-up, warm brick and two bedrooms and overlooking water. There’s a cafe across the street from their muted yellow doorway and Natasha drinks coffee again and waits, glasses over her eyes and hair wrapped tightly under her hat. A magazine obscures the rest of her face and she checks her wristwatch. Five minutes to ten, just like clockwork. You can take the soldier out of the military, she thinks with a small smirk as the yellow door opens.

She sees Steve, first, blue knit cap pulled over his head that can’t belong to him, isn’t something he’d ever pick up on his own. Her suspicions are confirmed when the American -- James now; Bucky, to Steve -- follows him out, still tense in the way he’ll probably always be, though Steve reaches out an arm and he takes it, face softening into something a lot like gratitude when he wraps his arm through the crook of Steve’s elbow, leans against his side while Steve checks the mail, even as his eyes dart up and down the street on instinct. His hair is long again, she notes idly: he’d cut it, the first time she’d seen it, slicked back and still longer than it was in old photos, but nothing like the Winter Soldier, obviously something he’d done himself. He’s let it grow out, trimmed around the edges, and he tucks a strand back under his own baseball hat, lets Steve pull him willingly down the steps and out onto the narrow street.

Natasha can’t help raise an eyebrow when it’s James who grabs the nape of Steve’s neck, first, pulling him down and into a kiss that has him teetering, off-balance and surprised, James’s left hand grabbing his hip for purchase and pulling them both in close. He’s wearing some kind of cloaking device over it -- a good one, the tech’s new, and Natasha would bet on either Fury or T’Challa, can’t imagine Tony keeping a secret like this. In direct light, the mechanism shimmers, if you know where to look -- but there’s little direct light here, and to the unfocused eye it looks like what it should: a flesh and blood hand, and a thin silver ring. That part, she’s guessing, isn’t part of the illusion. 

It’s Steve that gets a table, while James runs for the newspaper stand -- but not before kissing Rogers again, the kind of possessiveness Natasha associates with vulnerability, except she sees the steel in James’s eyes when he pulls away. He’s still daring the world to take Steve again, and she thinks, if anyone can keep Rogers safe, it’s someone with that expression. Steve just ducks his head, adjusts Bucky’s crooked hat over his skewed hair. and pushes him off in the direction of the newsstand.

 And he’s out of earshot, barely, when Steve says mildly, over his own tea, “so you take house calls now.” He looks more amused than anything else, opening the menu without looking down at it. 

“Just checking in.” She nods at the menu. “I hear the crepes are good here.” Steve shrugs. “Bucky gets ‘em a lot. You’d have to ask him.”

Natasha smirks over her sunglasses. “So why here?”

Steve looks around and shrugs. “Bucky liked it. Asked the hotel clerk about Captain America, guy didn’t have a clue.” Steve smiles, faint around the edges like he’s dusting it off. “Never was a big fan.”

“Didn’t like that you sold yourself to Uncle Sam as a lab rat?”

“Guess so. Never had the chance to talk about it much.” Steve raises an eyebrow. “He can be a lot like you sometimes. Oh--hey, Bucky.” He reaches out his hand, and Natasha’s surprised to see James take it, letting himself be pulled in easily, Steve’s arms around his waist. “Natasha Romanov. She’s a friend.”

James tips his head, the look on his face one Natasha remembers tracing in the mirror, a crease forming between his eyebrows as he looks at her, unsure. Memories that won’t slot into place, all of the edges beveled and smoothed. “It’s good to finally meet you, James,” she says, voice brisk and polite, not letting the cracks show, not acknowledging that she knows how often he’s been just out of her sight, a finger on a gun she’s long-since pinpointed.

He’s good, but she was always a little bit better, in a clean fight. But no fight is clean. It’s a pointless, wasteful lie.

Jarred, apparently, by Natasha close-up, James fumbles for the chair next to him until Steve moves it closer. James sits, sliding close enough that he’s touching Steve, shoulder to thigh, and Natasha wonders if this is what they were always like in private; if this is a response to all those years of distance, instead. James’s reaction to the way Steve reaches for his hand is a body memory, though, the way he doesn’t bother to look as their hands slide together, and Natasha smiles and glances at Steve. He looks young enough now to still be this person, in love and hopeful and still so much to lose. 

Natasha reaches out and touches the hand Steve doesn’t have clasped around James’s, squeezes and lifts it to her lips for a kiss. She can feel James watching her and stands, letting go of Steve and sliding a crisp bill onto the table beneath her cup. “I won’t hold up your morning,” she says with a smile. “It’s good to see you. James.” She slides around the table and touches his shoulder, the left one; he doesn’t flinch, and the crease between his eyebrows returns, more confused than predatory as he watches her step around to hug Steve, pull him close. Her lips press against his ear and she whispers to him, _take_ _care of yourself,_ adds, _I love you, Rogers_ , and smirks at the surprise in his expression when she’s moved away.

“Be careful, both of you.” She looks them over again: knees knocking under the table, hands held tight, they look nothing like the photos she remembers from briefings, nothing like her own reading, the history books or newspaper reels. Nothing like the frozen statues left to their memories, the ghosts of heroes made out of boys taken too young to know anything else.

“You know, there’s a memorial in Geneva…” she starts.

“Never been.” Steve cuts her off with a shrug and a small, sad smile, looking over at James. His eyes dart between them, visibly unsure what they’re talking about, and Natasha wonders again, just where the breaks still lie. If he has memories that don’t fit into any story, if he thinks of his life in broken narratives, too. _Truth_ _is_ _a matter of circumstance_ \-- it means nothing, when yours is taken from you. 

“You should go see it, someday,” she says, picking up her handbag. It holds a fake passport and a pistol that doesn’t set off metal detectors, a knife that folds into a lipstick case. “It’s nice.” 

Steve smiles at that, and holds James’s hand a little tighter. “Someday,” he agrees.

*

_Washington, D.C._

Four months later, at the urging of the Department of Defense and using intel offered by former agents Maria Hill and Natasha Romanov, the plaque on the memorial overlooking the Potomac is updated, bronzed and beveled typeface that gleams dully on sunny days like curved, metal fingers.

Captain  Steve Rogers

1918-2015

“The price of freedom is high, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

 

Natasha still sits in front of it, some days, looking out on the water, and wonders if Steve and James still have the same view.


End file.
